When you’re writing for work, it’s vital that your style is polished, correct and clear. It’s also important that an organisation’s communications style is consistent – and that’s where a style guide can help.

An off-the-shelf style guide can be useful – but a customised one for your organisation is much more effective. Our ‘Build your own style guide’ will help you develop your own personalised communications style.

Many minute-takers try to note everything down in a meeting – and then spend hours writing up notes onscreen as they try to work out what should go into the finished minutes. Here are some tips to help minute-takers capture the salient points during the meeting . . .

Congratulations to the HSE, which has recently launched Communicating Clearly – guidelines to show staff how they can use plain English. It covers ways to make all writing more readable, such as using ordinary words where possible or, where that’s not possible, to clearly explain the jargon or technical terms. Take a look at an extract . . .

Do you detest ‘touch base’? Or is it ‘blue sky thinking’ that makes you want to scream? A survey by job site Glassdoor found that the most hated jargon phrases included ‘run it up the flagpole’ and ‘game changer’. Sometimes,…